Well not one of my deepest posts today, more kind of a maintenance one...

Contributing to an open source project is - or at least should be - also a social moment: several people work together in their own free time to a common interest and a common goal. Things might be a bit more complicated when all the working people is scattered around several thousand miles between americas, europe and australia.

Let's tell the truth: if internet did not existed, probably not even open source communities might have been existed, or maybe not so much of it and widespreaded as they are now.

The working and cooperation instruments are surely less evolved than the ones that can be found in a professional working environment, well not true: i used svn and vim in a recent task at work, and used eclipse in another; anyway, usualy many communication problems got solved through mailing list, instant messenging and IRC.

Despite IRC is considered "out" from new generations, is still a very useful and interesting instrument for group chat and talking.

i mention IRC because in the latest two weeks had occasion to find the "IRCous" skills of pidgin, my default messenger and miranda, the backup one; therefore i have been able to connect quite regularly in the official AROS channel; there "i seen things you humans cannot imagine", if i want to be geeky and cite Blade Runner...:)

It is quite exciting to talk directly with someof the most important AROS system and software developers such as Michal Schulz, Maag^da, Stanislaw Szymczyk and the others.

See Maag^da introduce its new Autodoc for AROS, having Szymczyk and Schulz talk "live" about the latest developments in their own bounties (congratulations, Stanislaw: the bounty is almost done!) and exchange with them ideas and opinions - despite is not a new thing anymore and despite i haven't been an avid IRC user but just a casual user before - is a step forward from being a simple forum lurker and an avid news reader: it makes you "be there" and get some job done actively.

I just downloaded LUA for windows and started to give a first look in SDLBasic, knowing the latter attempts of Mazze in porting it under AROS (with no avail at the moment). I also collected some ideas for some script applications i would like to do, not world changing utilities but still something...

[edit: i gave a first look at the zulu documentation: the lua/mui interaction look quite basic and low level, i sincerely hope to understand something on it; by the way, considered that i have to start from scratch, hope that in the next future will get i better...]

I am also trying to understand how to build some window themes, once i will find the way to make my virtual aros-box communicate with the network.